Jimdo: Pages AND OpenID to the people

Remember the little OpenID incident at Next08 in May? I promised Andreas Stephan from Six Groups that I would blog about his service, if he would make OpenID support his top priority. Well, so it happened, and on June 6th, Six Group integrated OpenID login. Apparently, that has inspired another big German start-up as well, since Oliver Moser from Jimdo mailed me that his service also supports OpenID now.

Jimdo is an online Ajax-based website builder, which makes it easy for basically anyone to create a slick-looking page – sort of like an online iWeb. Their list of widgets is impressive, and Alexa tells us the service has been steadily growing. Here’s what Oliver has sent me:

From today on we’re supporting OpenID – but not as a provider, just as a host. Jimdo-users can now sign into their Jimdo-Page with their OpenID. But more important, they can use their personal Jimdo-Domain as an OpenID, even though Jimdo is not the provider. So if they comment on a blog post they can use their own domain – which of course makes a lot of sense.

You may wonder why Jimdo doesn’t act like a provider. Oliver has an answer to that question too: “There are already so many of then, so there’s no need for Jimdo being an additional one. And since OpenID enables Dataportability, we can actually make great use of it.”

Last week, some people at Supernova said OpenID and Dataportability have just become press releases machines. I can see why they say that, but I also think that it doesn’t hurt anyone (apart from our email inbox) since more and people will get familiar with the idea of open data. Also the less web-savvy ones, like most of the Jimdo users.